The following is the personal account of a single, long-winded individual’s experiences living and working in Antarctica. No part of it has been reviewed or in any way endorsed by the United States Antarctic Program or the National Science Foundation, or any other public or private organization, institution, contractor, or company associated therewith. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone, for good or for ill.
Day 40: 22 February, 94 miles today, 276 miles remaining to McMurdo, ambient temperature -26°C, the Ross Ice Shelf
The end was finally near. While the triplet of ice-clad volcanos that make up Ross Island was not yet visible on the northern horizon, we were close enough to feel the strange magnetic pull of that place. We were far enough from the South Pole that the sun had long stopped tracing a perfect circle in the sky, rising as high at noon as it might be at 5 in the afternoon during a May day in the States and sinking lower and lower toward the horizon each night—though still never quite touching it. In McMurdo, the sun had already begun to set behind the mountains. The entire continent was settling into the time of year when everything seemed sleepy and subdued. The dusk that takes all day. The golden hour that lasts for months.
Each day we had been at Pole, the station’s population had grown smaller and smaller, winnowing away the ebullient summer crew. A few days after we’d left, one last decrepit LC-130 herc had touched down on the groomed skiway and collected the last of them, leaving behind a band of 40 to weather the long polar night. As we at last came toward the end of the trail, the same metamorphosis was already underway at McMurdo, though of course the scale was vastly different. The station was emptying out for the winter; most of the people we knew would already be gone by the time we made it back to station. It would make for a bittersweet return. If we hit a patch of good luck on this last, great push of the journey across the continent—if the weather held its fierce and terrible breath while we passed, if every machine held itself together for just a few hundred miles more, if no further catastrophe befell any of the loads along the way—we might make it back home in four day’s time. Sean Meadow was scheduled to fly north in three and a half.
Even four days was, perhaps, just a bit ridiculously optimistic. Everything was falling apart, rotted with the stress of all the long days and uncountable hard miles. Most load checks left most of us with at least one makeshift repair to fashion together before we could resume our course. In the morning, as I was walking around my extended triple-load, I found a crack in the corner of one of the plastic sheets. It was only a couple of feet long, but as it hadn’t been there at the previous day’s last load checks, it was clearly growing fast; if it was a surprising annoyance now, by lunch it would likely be a nightmarish calamity. The stop-gap for cracking HMW that is not yet completely ruined is to dead-end the split with a perfectly round hole in the material. I left the SPOT 3 supervisor and the mechanic foreman to coordinate the hand-off of the traverse’s only hole saw, while I worked to replace yet another ring strap that had finally been worn clean through as 3,775 miles of tiny ice crystals had scraped against it as it passed.
The wind was mercifully still, but the temperature had dropped 10°C overnight. The cold was noticeable each time I knelt in the snow to contrive another repair to the rigging holding my two-dozen half-inflated fuel bladders in place. During the day’s last load check, I found the shackle keeping in place the dyneema rope which held the CRREL tools together had vanished—come somehow unscrewed and gotten buried in the snow behind me. This was one of the more reliable pieces of the rigging tying the whole mess behind my tractor together, checked along with everything else several times each day, so I was astounded to find it missing. A thin, flat layer of clouds had pooled overhead, like a puddle of milky tea spilled across an enormous glass table, and left the sun veiled and dim. Though it was midafternoon in a land where, even this late into the season, the sun did not set, it felt like twilight, the drawn-out tail end of some impossibly long day. As I tightened a replacement shackle into place, I looked out over the flat expanse of the ice shelf stretching forever into the distance, muted and golden in the quiet, whispering dusk. The cold settled into my coat as I worked on my load, a Ship of Theseus of replaced rigging and makeshift straps. It would take a miracle for everything to hold together long enough to get us back to McMurdo without any further delays—but as I gazed across the impractical, painted landscape, it occurred to me that it was something of a miracle that we were out here at all. In such a fantastic, unlikely place, anything at all might be possible. Even hope.
Day 41: 23 February, 105 miles today, 171 miles remaining to McMurdo, ambient temperature -22°C, the Ross Ice Shelf
I was sitting quietly at the kitchen table, working on my first pint of coffee, when one of the mechanics burst into the module. A retired seabee, he carried himself with the reserved self-discipline common to former career military, and always wore a plated, camo patrol cap anytime it wasn’t cold enough to demand anything more robust. In the real world, he’d said, he never cooked anything more complicated than spaghettios, and on SPOT 1 had managed to trade away every one of his cooking shifts for additional rounds of camp chores. We had all assumed that this because of some rigid and arcane view on gender role, although that explanation never quite made much sense—the USAP, like the US military, was populated more heavily by men than by women, and in both kitchen duty was assigned routinely to men. The real reason, as we would eventually find out, was that during his one previous season on traverse, the old supervisor had criticized his cooking efforts so harshly that he had vowed privately to never again make himself subject to such humiliation. When coaxed eventually to take his turn piloting the microwave, he did demonstrate a tendency to blast the precooked logs of chicken cordon bleu he always prepared until they were tough and rubbery, but nobody complained. The job was to make a hot meal for the entire crew; however any individual chose to meet that obligation was entirely up to them.
“Oh man,” the mechanic said, as he walked up from the incinolet. “I don’t know what it is about that vegetarian food, but every time we have it, the next day it’s always in a big hurry to come back out.” Nobody on traverse was spared cook duty: the SPOT 3 supervisor, our lone vegetarian, had cooked the evening before. Though he always had a lot on his metaphorical plate, he was also perhaps the only person on the crew who tended to avoid entirely the large trays of frozen meals in that were the keystones in most other cooks’ meal plans, preferring to whip together large and impressive spreads almost entirely from scratch. He never worked from a recipe, but always wildly improvised until he had a concoction he was happy with. I always liked it when he cooked. His dinners were always flavorful and were the rare meal that actually felt like they were sort of healthy. But I did know what the mechanic was talking about. “It’s the lentils,” I said.
The mechanic and the supervisor were the extremes, two ends of a spectrum on which most of us found ourselves to be somewhere in the middle. Some of people who came to traverse barely knew how to work a stove—nobody was hired, after all, because of their cooking experience—while others had spent years working in one kitchen or another and were easily bored at the thought of nuking a series of catering trays. I tended to make more elaborate dinners because I liked doing it. Putting together a menu I found interesting from the scant ingredients we had on hand was fun for me. It gave me something to think about during the long hours we each spent alone in our cabs. But cooking for ten people (or eleven, or fourteen) in only an hour is incredibly stressful, moreso than I think any of us expected, and at the end of the day, all any of us really wanted was something hot to eat when we came into camp after fuel circle, cold through and covered head to foot in snow.
It was probably for this reason as much as anything else that some people came to rely on a fixed menu—if you didn’t feel at home in front of the stove, it was probably best to forgo the hair-pulling anxiety that came from realizing too late the pan of raw chicken tendies you had in the oven was going to take three times as long to cook as you’d planned on, and just stick with something you already knew was going to work. It sounds dull, knowing that you can count on having one particular meal or another when certain people come around on the cook’s rotation, but a couple of these were consistently our favorites. One of the operators always, always served milk-carton eggs scrambled with frozen spinach, a steaming pot of reconstituted refried beans, a pot of rice, and big stack of tortillas—and his dinner-time breakfast burritos were ranked as nearly everyone’s favorite meal. The russian roulette of invention and improvisation could occasionally pay off with one of the traverse’s most savory and memorable dinners, but sometimes it didn’t. Another operator, who had assumed without close inspection that the cans in the pantry were marinara, only to discover at the last movement that they were, in fact, beef chili, went ahead and used the chili as an ersatz meat sauce. It sounded plausible when he explained that the chili had some tomato in it, somewhere, but the resultant plate of pasta with meatballs, topped with a chili that was, conservatively, 90% ground beef was, in the end, a bit much.
There are days on traverse where everything goes well. The trail is firm and smooth, all of the equipment holds together, and nothing on the loads breaks (at least, not catastrophically). If you’re on the ice shelf, and still 100 miles or more from McMurdo, you have nothing to look at but the line of tractors ahead of you; nothing to listen to over the thrum of your engine but the podcasts and music you’ve grown tired of hearing over the last four thousand miles. You mind wanders, but never very much father than the kitchen. As you race across the endless fields of snow, tearing up mile after identical mile, you start to daydream of food, of all the hurried and frantically-prepared dinners you’ve eaten in the last three months. Maybe not every meal was ideal, but not one stooped to the kind of spite that you feel radiating sometimes from the hot line in the McMurdo galley. And, always, the question lingers, as the trail runs on forever along its dead straight course across the white, unbroken plains: what will we be having for dinner tonight?
Day 42: 24 February, 107 miles today, 64 miles remaining to McMurdo, ambient temperature -27°C, the Ross Ice Shelf
It had gotten cold. Once we had descended to the ice shelf on the SPOT 1 return, it was pretty much shorts weather all the way to McMurdo—sometimes I didn’t bother to put my pants back on during load check or lunch, and walked around the soft powder in the gym shorts I’d taken to wearing in the cab, though that left me without anywhere reliable to clip my handheld radio. But now we were dogged by the sort of temperatures we previously had seen only on the plateau. The seasons had unmistakably begun their inevitable change, and being outside was going to be distinctly uncomfortable from now until whenever we left the continent. Even without a cutting wind to make everything miserable, the air was hard and bitter as I walked outside to empty my jug into the u-barrel at the back end of camp, and it stung my face, which I had yet to make a habit of covering up before leaving the warmth of the indoors. A thick blanket of ice fog had rolled in overnight, presumably carrying moisture from the open water of the nearing coast, and the entire camp was speckled with a layer of hoarfrost. The fog would clear by the time we were done with our brief morning meeting, but the fat, delicate crystals of frost could still be found here and there even at the end of the long and wearying day.
Since I’d started this job six months before, I’d gotten better at backing the tractor onto a load, but still not what I would call good. The Caterpillar MT865 Challenger is a big machine that excels at doing big things: it is great for dragging three empty fuel loads 107 miles in a single day. If you need to bump it forward just a half-inch so you can line the hitch up with the tongue of a CRREL tool, though, it kinda sucks. But it’s the little things that make the big things possible, so I spent several frustrating minutes trying to tap the machine onto the load in fractions of an inch, before I was free to inspect the hundreds of straps keeping my half-inflated bladders in place. The frigid air clawed at my face as I made my rounds—I had, once again, not thought to wear a buff while headed outside.
As we rolled north, however, the cold worked in our favor. The trail was hard and fast, and we screamed across the ice shelf at a mind-melting 12mph. As we pressed on throughout the day, though, it also became uneven, and we ran our machines over a series of almost regularly-spaced bumps that seemed to stretch forever into the distance ahead, like small waves in the snow. The tractors rocked like ships on an irritable sea, and in the cabs we and all our belongings were thrown constantly around until our bones ached. I remembered how irritating I’d found this stretch of trail on the southbound leg of SPOT 1, when we’d been hitting these ridges and lumps at less than half the speed. Now, it was like having to make our way through Sastrugi National Park all over again.
But the end was, quite literally, in sight. As a bank of clouds lifted to the northwest, Minna Bluff came into view, elongated and twisted by a pronounced fata morgana, and capped by the white dome of Mt. Discovery towering behind it. These were landmarks of mainland Antarctica, clearly visible from McMurdo Station on a clear day. We were getting close. Up ahead, the sky was lined with long, thin ribbons of clouds that caught the sun and lit up like bright, phosphorescent streamers. I’d never seen anything quite like it, and I couldn’t now quite figure out whether these shining sky eels were really so long and skinny or if this was a trick of perspective. As I watched, the show in the sky dissipated, and from the clearing wall of clouds directly ahead, Mt. Erebus slowly emerged to beckon us home, a long string of white volcanic steam from its open mouth blown across the sky by the high-altitude winds. It was a beacon, calling us home to Ross Island, to McMurdo Station, the continent’s great city, built on the crumbling rock at the foot of the great mountain.
As we pulled up to a stop at day’s end, Erebus once again withdrew behind a veil of clouds, but we could nonetheless feel its presence up ahead. Just one more good day would deliver us home, so we pulled into what we hoped would be our last fuel circle of the season. As I worked to clear a series of two-inch-thick icicles that poured from 308’s counterweights and onto its poor bogie wheels, chipping away at them with the pointed end my spud wrench, a sharp, heavy block of ice came loose from somewhere above my head and in a valiant last stand in defense of its icy brethren in the tracks, struck me just above the eyebrow. I’d had my fleece-lined hat pulled low to guard against the cold, and that protective layer helped to soften the blow, but still I howled beneath my tractor in a mix of pain and surprise—though nobody could hear me over the rumbling of the tractors nearby. I’d made it almost to the end of the trail without ever being attacked by ice, but not quite. I belly-crawled my way out, the throbbing above my eyebrow leaving me sullen and grumpy as I set to helping the others disconnect and stow all the fuel hoses.
“I’m actually going to really miss doing this with you guys,” one of the operators was saying. “Yeah,” said another, “this has been a lot of fun.” I was caught off guard by their wistfulness, and in the face of their good cheer my irritation began to ebb—though my eyebrow continued to pound like a motherfucker. I looked around at my companions, my trail-mates for the last three months. Much of our time on trail had been hard, had been downright brutal, most especially at fuel circle, when we were all exposed to elements and things had a tendency to go horribly sideways in a hurry. I might be anxious to get home, hopeful yet that I might catch Sean Meadow before she left, ready to be off trail and back into whatever passed for normal life on the ice. But even so they were right: even the worst days on trail had been fun, in their own twisted way. I was going to miss it when it was finally done.
Day 43: 25 February, 64 miles today, 0 miles remaining to McMurdo, ambient temperature -25°C, McMurdo Station
The last of day of SPOT 3 opened with a cold, placid dawn—the first real sunrise any of us had witnessed on trail. For months, the sun had been tracing oblong circles in the sky without once ever dipping below the horizon. Only now, on the very last day of the last traverse across the empty plains of untrammeled snow, were we far enough north, late enough in the season, for the languid sun to have set even for an hour. Even then, nobody saw it happen. Proper sunset would have happened well after midnight, and those night owls who known among the SPOT 3 crew for staying up “late” were still typically in bed well before 2200hrs. True sunrise would likewise have happened while each of us was sleeping off another long and tiring day, but as I staggered onto the snow at 0430, the cold and sluggish sun had barely cleared the flat line of the ice shelf. I had only a moment to savor it, as I sleepily emptied by jug into the waiting u-barrel for perhaps the last time, as it was about to slip behind a low ceiling of thick, uniform cloud, where it would hide for the next several days. One of the mechanics was already up, but by then he would be in the gen mod, pumping the free weights he kept stashed in the corner. There were no other humans awake within 60 miles, and none across the ice in McMurdo would have the clear view to the southeast that I had. This perfect, fleeting view, this barest glimpse of the world’s grandeur and immaculate beauty was for me alone, in all the world: the dude dumping a half-gallon of pee into a funnel crusted with dark yellow ice.
The sun rose high above the clouds, and by the time we were ready to roll the light across the ice was completely flat. Visually, it was like driving into a bowl of milk, though the ridges and dips that had made the previous afternoon such a rollicking pain in the head hadn’t gone anywhere—now we just couldn’t see them coming. But at our left hands, Minna Bluff stood out sharp and black against the blank white sky. This long, craggy spit is a well known feature of McMurdo’s regional topography, but at that distance it’s indistinct, more useful for judging the distance of incoming storms than actually pretty. Closer up, though, it’s a dark, ornately-faceted jewel. On the other side of our caravan lay the gargantuan, bulbous glaciers flowing from the flanks of living Mt. Erebus and long-dead Mt. Terror, blindingly lit by a break in the clouds that closely circumnavigated the volcanoes’ snow-white curves, letting in just enough sunlight to make them shine brightly in the gloom.
Even this close to the trail’s end we couldn’t sure how long the short remainder of the journey might take. Since we had last crossed the Shear Zone, a novel, thoroughly-untested solution to a novel problem had been implemented, and we had no way of knowing how it might impact our rare, eccentric convoy. As the region had warmed (along with the rest of the planet), less snow had come to accumulate in the Shear Zone, leaving the crevasses that opened each year with thinner and thinner snow bridges—which was why we’d seen so many open pits on our last time through. As SPOT 2 had passed on their own return a month earlier, they’d left windrows along the side of the trail in the hope that drifts these would leave over winter would create a sturdier top layer of snow on the narrow lane through this dangerous field of cracks and chasms. Nobody would be able to tell how good this idea may or may not be until the Shear Zone crew came out to inspect it early in the following summer; in the meantime we had to figure out how badly the drifts that already started to form would interfere with our loads, particularly the long strings of light, hard-to-control bladders half-inflated with air. They might ride easily in the middle of the slender road, or they might swing wildly to the side and wipe out the markers detailing the placement of each potential hazard along the side.
The SPOT 3 supervisor’s answer to this unknown, after a short recon run to the far side of the Shear Zone and back, was two break the caravan into two groups. The first through the passage were the tractors pulling simple loads: these would would essentially beta test the road, the hope being that any serious problems would reveal themselves on the shorter, easier to control loads before we tried anything with the long tails that had the potential to cause serious damage. If they ran into trouble in the crossing, the rest of the loads would have to be tagged across, which would likely add hours to our journey—meaning that we would likely not arrive until that evening. Once they cleared the lane without incident, however, those of us hauling empty doubles and triples (and camp) were sent through. Finally back on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, we were at long, long last on the home stretch. The SPOT 3 supervisor played tour guide, pointing out local landmarks and features that we had missed on the socked-in return on SPOT 1 to the mechanics who were so new to the program that they’d barely had time to complete their required on-ice trainings before being set into the cab of a tractor and pointed at the South Pole.
We pulled into SPOTSA and staged our loads across the pad, to be cleaned up over the coming weeks and stowed for the hard Antarctic winter. There was a flurry of frenzied activity around the living mod, as those of us with at least enough of our belongings to make it through the next few days already packed grabbed our bags and bolted down the stairs to the van waiting to hurry us into town. The transition, which had still been a treacherous bog the last time we’d been though, had hardened in the recent cold, becoming at last a solid block of ice capable of supporting all sort of vehicles from the ice shelf onto the rock. It was a short ride up the hill and into the station complex itself, but I could feel the passage of each and every minute we spent on the winding dirt road in the turns of my stomach. Sean Meadow would be leaving McMurdo in a mere handful of minutes—the airplane that would carry her from Phoenix Airfield and away from Antarctica was already well on the way and would be on the ice in little more an hour. We had battled our way back from the South Pole, making incredible time for much of the journey. We had driven through storms and across miles and miles of unforgiving terrain, seemingly pushing the bounds of what ten people could do with ten ag tractors in a land hostile to everything that was healthy for humans and machines alike, racking up days of triple-digit miles in the drive to return to to our remote island home. And in the end, that monumental effort had given Sean Meadow and me 15 minutes together in a crowded office hallway.
For us even to have had that moment had been incredibly unlikely. Almost any other season and she would have been long gone days before we crossed the Willy Field skiway, reentered the McMurdo snow road system, and thus left the trail officially behind us. It would be easy over my last few weeks on the ice to think about the time we hadn’t gotten to spend together before she flew north, but on that day, in that hallway, there was only the gratitude of finding one more tight, full-body hug at the end of the trail, one more gentle kiss, once more hearing her sing-song voice in my one good ear. A few more weeks, another month, and we’d be back together in our small mountain home. But in the meantime, this embrace would be enough—this tender tangle of heavy coats and quilted overalls, fleece-line hats and mittens and insulted boots, at the clouded and dusk-lit end of the bright and finite summer, tucked along the wall of a busy, tumultuous corridor, in a crumbling and dusty building at the heart of remote and ramshackle research station, 60 miles from the mainland middle of nowhere.
